The drop is always movingYou know that saying about standing on the shoulders of giants? Drupal is standing on a huge pile of midgetsAll content management systems suck, Drupal just happens to suck less.Popular open source software is more secure than unpopular open source software, because insecure software becomes unpopular fast. [That doesn't happen for proprietary software.]Drupal makes sandwiches happen.There is a module for that

What makes a great leader

Submitted by nk on Sat, 2007-05-26 05:43

Alas I do not know, I am just watching what Dries does because he does it right. Despite just a year ago he was not too convinced that the Schema API is a good idea, yesterday he committed just that. We had raw SQL statements with Drupal 5.0 and below, in 5.0 we began to use the thin Drupal database layer to write SQL install statements and now we can just use arrays to achieve the same. No longer can "not sure whether this works with postgresql" hold up a patch. Yay.

On an another note, I wanted to remove the locks from Drupal -- and equally yesterday it happened because David Strauss brought in a better patch. Thanks!

Just do it

Submitted by nk on Tue, 2007-05-01 20:14

You come to IRC and detail the greatest idea since sliced bread and lukewarm water. The reaction is "hey, do it!". You might think that's just "go away" in a more polite way. You are wrong. Just today EclipseGC's patch landed which changed the pager to a list. Let me quote something "feedback from other community members (chx) it was brought to my attention that this would be much better implemented through theme_item_list. Chx handed me a rewrite of the theme_pager that illustrated the basic principle, and mentioned that theme_pager_list probably needed to disappear."

This is what you will get from me if you go in and do it. I will give you feedback, I will give you code snippets to further your effort. Do not expect me to realize your idea, though.

Do you want a visit from the police?

Submitted by nk on Sat, 2007-04-14 20:53

You see, it's not hard to write sensational titles. I never thought I need to write about why keeping up with security patches are important, but apparently, some do not get it and spread their idiocy (I am not naming anyone, you know who you are). It was suggested that most people will find it nonprofitable to keep the website security updated when comparing the upgrade cost with the recovery costs of a hacked website, taking also in account the reputation and losses for the business.. Hint: merely restoring your website does not solve anything -- it's not like a successful attack needs to change anything on your website. As long there is a possibility to inject JavaScript somewhere, your site is open to a number of interesting things which even might lead you finding yourself trouble with the authorities.

SoC results

Submitted by nk on Thu, 2007-04-12 08:23

TWENTY projects accepted for Drupal for the 2007 version of Google Summer of Code. Two core themes. Three project*module projects, one by none less the industry heavyweight Gábor Hojtsy -- who is not just the php.net webmaster and an editor of the widely acclaimed PHP manuals but a long time Drupal contributor as well (also, he introduced me to Drupal). There will be a BitTorrent tracker written and I would like to see that on drupal.org eventually -- screencasts, presentation videos would benefit of that.

Time for Form API feature requests

Submitted by nk on Mon, 2007-04-09 06:16

Have you tried to coded some tricky form and failed or nearly failed or it was just too hard? Now is the time to send me such problems, because between April 21-May 1 there will be a form API coding spree -- I will fly to Chicago and spend hours every day with Jeff Eaton on form API.

OSCMS 2007

Submitted by nk on Fri, 2007-03-23 05:43

At the end of the day I met Tao Starbow who has this strange AHAH solution which is really undrupalish code and yet. Eaton, Chad, Earl and myself walked to Earl's car and by the time we got to Sheraton, there was a serious groundwork done. As the evening progressed, we basically decided how dynamic forms will be done, how security is going to be addressed. Basically, there will be a callback (or more than one) where JS can issue something very close to a form alter, get back a themed HTML string and the form array gets stored in cache_forms table.

It was a fun day but a bit tiring. Thanks Yahoo! and Earl for providing space and inspiring environment.

We have dopry

Submitted by nk on Tue, 2007-03-06 20:55

It's so very exciting to work at NowPublic these days. Finally, we are porting to Drupal 5. And, Darrel O' Pry (dopry) is working for NowPublic as of today. I really want to release everything that worths releasing -- in the past this was not really possible because of the slightly outdated codebase. But now, we are flying -- some patches and minor stuff are in CCK and Views already. What will happen now that we have a major CCK person in house... I can't imagine but it's surely very exciting.

Komodo 4 rocks

Submitted by nk on Fri, 2007-03-02 02:33

I really dig this software. It's also important that their support site runs Drupal and the support lead, Jeff Griffits is a long time Drupal developer. After we exchanged a few mails about Drupal autocomplete, it turns out that Komodo can only handle static includes at this time and 4.1 will be better in this regard. Meanwhile, autocomplete for core is available.

One minor thing -- this cix extension is one letter off :P

Drupal is for you even if you did not think so

Submitted by nk on Thu, 2007-03-01 20:46

I find it quite fascinating that there are now modules to bring in developers who do not want to develop with Drupal. For example if you are in the camp that sneers "lisp's had this for decades" on every possible feature? Then Drupal is for you thanks to the dript project.

You are lured by the hyped frameworks like Ruby on Rails? One of the finest MVC frameworks for PHP 4 and 5 is CakePHP and the drake project bridges it to Drupal.

Bring it on!

Emmy Noether on ...

Submitted by nk on Mon, 2007-02-26 20:12

There is a fictional dialog at The Dialogs site with Emmy Noether about a couple things of which I would like to point out one: attention. There was something about attention lately -- Laura Scott's recent blog post about how to use open source (and how not to) where she talked of

Because what you want for your website is attention

. Now let's quote from that dialog:

if you grab more public attention today, then someone gets less.

so "it can be easily sold".